Scientific Dramatics
Monday, August 21, 2006
Diana left for Chicago that day to begin a new life in the big world of the windy city, or near to it at least. However, she was still close enough to home for weekend visits.
Monday morning before tutoring Collette arrived to find Pumpkin bounding around the house, chasing a poor moth, who eventually sought shelter behind one of Mom’s china plates on the living room wall. Linnea removed the threat before a grand crash might occur.
At breakfast, Frances was occupying himself with a packaged length of string cheeses, rolling them up tightly into an ammo belt. And Rose sat down to toast and eggs with two fountains of hair sticking out of her head.
“There’s a stink weed growing out of Rose’s head,” Carrie informed the table, as she sat down next to Rose.
In the meantime, Joe filled out Eagle forms, Mom taught Linnea on the War of 1812 while Collette reviewed radio telescopes with Rose, and a slew of rather ridiculous questions were thrown at Mom, which had never really seemed to be unusual:
“Mom, was I ever a Cub Scout?”
“What colors make violet?”
“Is Joe’s real name Joseph? I didn’t know that.”
And Carrie was barraged with continuous phone calls from Elizabeth and Lucia, who were both going back to the community college for their third and second years, respectively. Somehow, despite their former experience, they were both a trifle panicky over the situation. Elizabeth called to have Carrie tell her what to wear to class, and Lucia called incessantly:
“Carrie! I’ll pay your gas money if you just come with me and walk me to class! I can’t do it by myself!”
Carrie tried to reason them through their dilemmas finally having to tell Lucia that it was about time that she leave for class. And Lucia eventually called back several hours later to tell Carrie that she could not find her classroom, and so, her first day of class had been more or less unintentionally… skipped.
Before Carrie and Collette dropped Rose off for her first college class, Rose gave Collette and Joe her own version of the Big Bang Theory.
“It was at the Tower of Babel,” she said. “God said, “’Ok, you’re going to all go off far away now.’ And, bang! Everyone was spread out.”
Later, Joe left for another intense bike ride with Wallace, and Rose was dropped off near the Humanities building for Egyptology, rather nervous as well. But an hour and a half later, she returned still in one piece, with a syllabus thirty pages thick.
That evening, Dad and OLeif joined everyone for chicken fried steak and cherry pie, a driving lesson for Rose, and then a viewing of The Time Machine, while Carrie dyed several heads of hair amongst the girls. OLeif had never seen the old version of The Time Machine.
“Ah, see, you’ve missed out because you didn’t grow up in the Snicketts family,” Carrie joked. “We’ve seen all the low-budget 60’s B movie sci-fi films there are.”
At just the right dramatic moment, the movie’s hero crashed exhausted and bleeding into his dining room amongst his friends in smoking jackets and wine glasses. His shirt was torn in appropriate places and dirt was smudged uniformedly across his face for purposes of keeping his handsome appearance somewhat still handsome despite having just flown backwards across 800,000 years being chased across Utopian planes by warlocks.
“Ah, back in the day, he was a looker,” Carrie said. “He was the one guy Eve and I both ever agreed was good looking. We watched it and Eve would sit there sniffing her parts and Bing and I would take scientific notes. It was the best.”